The Ultimate Tape Archive V4.0
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Release date: 10th of March, 2023

Welcome to the most complete Commodore 64 cassette archive that exists. By complete, we do not mean it contains all the titles ever made, but that all included titles are complete with coverscans and manuals all in one place for you to enjoy.

It's been a while since our previous release and some of you may have wondered if we gave up. Rest assured, we did not. For the 4th time, we've increase the count by another 500 making it a total of a whopping 2000 releases. This is The Ultimate Tape Archive V4.0!

From the next release and onward we will reduce number of new additions to 250 titles. This is because our stash of already prepared material has run out, and in addition one of our team members has simply run out of stuff to preserve. We do hope that by reducing this goal it will prevent us from going more than a full year before the next update sees the light of the day and it also feels more manageable. 500 may not seem that many, but depending on the title that we're preserving, it may take us anything from 30 minutes to several hours to preserve in full. That does not include the time spent to compile the collection and quality check the data (naturally, we slip up sometimes, but since the first release to the present, about 50 minor and less minor mistakes have been corrected. We think that's not such a bad number, and of course, there are likely a few more to be found and corrected.)

As always, we strive for 100% complete releases, but have decided to still include a few releases that we currently miss posters or audio tapes for, since it does not directly affect the playability of the games.

We mentioned earlier having reached a point where you will see quite a few titles with more than one version, sometimes even three or more of the same. As we mentioned previously, this is the result of us focusing on releases rather than the individual titles. Users who choose to only keep the .tap-files will, in many cases, not notice any difference between them, because it is likely that only the packaging is different, especially in the case of budget label re-releases.

For the tapes that can benefit from index files (.idx, supported by DC2N, NOVA64 and the Ultimate products), we've still done our best to create them, particularly for multi-game compilations and multi-load games. A few of these multi-load games are so poorly programmed, that they do not stop the tape when a title screen or level is loaded. There is no workaround that we can apply for these, so if you find a game not loading properly, be sure to check if this is the cause. There is also one version of the Burner fast loading system we are aware of that will not work on all C64s. This is because the loader is written using unofficial machine code instructions, some of which are unstable and create different results on different C64s.

We have as usual used Tape Manager V1.3 (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=172213) to organize the content, and again exported an sqlite-file for the NOVA64 front end (or other applications that may have implemented it). The latest version of the NOVA64 front end can be downloaded from CSDB (https://csdb.dk/release/index.php?id=230270). The front-end will enable you to run the images on both emulators and on real C64s (with additional hardware). The latest version will also make it possible to start VICE (later versions) using the offsets in the index files, making game compilations more useable in VICE if you choose to launch your games from within the front end.

And also as before...

You are free to distribute this archive to your friends, but it should always remain 100% free and kept away from any solutions that require any kind of registration or payment. Apart from that, we do not care much about what happens, as we consider this a piece of history, OUR history.

In addition to the excellent (!) team, we had good help and contributions from the following people:

Count Zero / CyberpunX - for donating lots of tape originals
Zoe Blade - for also donating lots tape originals
Stadium64 - for once again supplying numerous missing instruction scans for various games
Jim - for supplying a few instruction scans and allowing us to use some of his cover scans
HBH - for the Helikopter-Jagd cover scan
Jason Scott - for giving us the opportunity to reach more enthusiasts with our work through archive.org

...and of course also to the contributors who have chosen to be anonymous, or that we may have forgotten to mention (we apologize if you belong to that category, let us know and we'll make it up to you in our next release!)

If, for any reason you'd like to get in touch with us, we can now be reached at ultimatetapearchive@proton.me

Until next time, we still hope you will have fun and find lots of great (and maybe some not so great) memories!


Signed,
The Ultimate Tape Archive Team

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